Thursday, August 18, 2011

Review MyBook

Review: Western Digital MyBook 6TB Studio Edition II: Western Digital sent us 6TB in its latest MyBook Studio Edition II for review. It retails for about $549. Obviously, this isn’t a professional rig like XRAIDs and the like, but if you want hard drive that is:
Super energy efficient
Quiet
Moderately speedy
Easy to setup
Around $500
The MyBook Studio Edition II comes in a foot cube box and is the same size as most dual 3.5 inch hard drives out there. This one however, is the first with two 3TB drives inside.

The two internal drives are 3TB WD Caviar Green (specs/review) which can be had for about $188/ea

You’ve either got a massive 6GB RAID 0 striped volume (which is the default shipping config.) or two redundant 3TB drives in a RAID config. The packaging includes a AC power (with UK adapter), a USB- mini USB cable and Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 adapters. The enclosure is plastic and isn’t going to win any design awards.

The drive also has a eSATA port but my eval unit at least didn’t come with an eSata adapter. That’s fine, most Macs won’t have a use for it.

Performance: The first Mac I tried this on was a 13-inch 2.4GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro with a Seagate 7200RPM Hybrid SSD/HDD internal drive and 4GB of RAM. The backups and file copying over Firewire 800 were about as fast as I’ve seen. However, the bottleneck was likely in the local drive speed and the Firewire 800.